[Mb-civic] How To Keep Elections Honest

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

How To Keep Elections Honest 
by Thom Hartmann

Ironically, the Democratic Party knows how to highlight election 
fraud and start national movements to bring down administrations 
that try to steal elections. A Party-affiliated group has helped do it 
four times in the past four years. 
But not in Ohio, Florida, or anywhere else in the USA. 
Instead, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs 
(Madeleine K. Albright, Chairman) has joined up with a similar 
organization affiliated with the Republican Party (the International 
Republican Institute - John McCain, Chairman), other NGOs, and 
US government agencies to support the use of exit polls and 
statistical analyses to challenge national elections in Ukraine, 
Serbia, Belarus, and the former Soviet republic of Georgia. 
In two of those four nations they succeeded in not only mounting a 
national challenge, but in reversing the outcomes of corrupted 
elections. The Ukrainian election is still hanging in the balance. 
The election challenges were accomplished by funding local groups 
who worked to expose evidence of rigged elections. 
As Ian Traynor notes in a 26 November 2004 article in The 
Guardian titled US Campaign Behind The Turmoil In Kiev, "the 
campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly 
conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in 
four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged 
elections and topple unsavory regimes." 
The campaign to unseat corrupt regimes is funded by groups 
affiliated with both the Democratic and Republican parties, Traynor 
notes, as well as the US State Department, the US Agency for 
International Development, and non-governmental organizations 
including George Soros's Open Society Institute and the late 
Eleanor Roosevelt's organization Freedom House (a group whose 
board of directors is now chaired by the notorious former CIA 
director R. James Woolsey). 
Woolsey's participation aside, Traynor's report implies that this 
coalition of political, governmental, and philanthropic groups is more 
interested in promoting honest democracy than in propping up 
regimes friendly to the US. One of the four candidates they've 
supported in the past four years was even openly anti-US 
(Kostunica in Serbia). The common denominator among the nations 
targeted is that in all four there was widespread evidence the 
regimes in power were planning to steal the elections. 
One of the keys to making the program work is tight organization 
and planning. The resistance movement is branded with a single-
phrase slogan such as "He's Finished" or "High Time," and an 
uncomplicated logo is designed - like the fist used in Serbia or the 
ticking clock used in Ukraine - that's easily reproduced on posters 
and stencil-spray-painted in public places. 
If there is evidence of election fraud on Election Day, Traynor 
reports, then the apparatus springs into action. Their main tool is a 
nationwide set of exit polls along with election observers supplied by 
credible organizations like the Organization for Security and 
Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The exit poll results are released to 
the public before the official results, putting the regime in power in 
the difficult position of being reactive rather than proactive in 
declaring victory. 
Because in each of these nations the media - radio, TV, and 
newspapers - are either controlled by, beholden to, or owned by 
supporters of the regime in power, the disparity between the exit 
polls and the official election result is trumpeted through non-
traditional media like the internet, local activist groups, and mass 
rallies, until a critical mass is achieved, forcing the mainstream 
(regime-friendly) media to cover the story. 
At the same time, nations who claim the ideal of free, fair, and 
transparent elections are encouraged to speak out. This is no 
accident, of course - Traynor reports that the US government itself 
invested over $44 million in challenging the results of the Serbian 
election, and is estimated to have put $14 million into supporting 
groups challenging the recent Ukrainian election. 
In many ways, such campaigns mirror what Republicans did in 
2000, when they organized an airlift of aides from Tom DeLay's 
office in Washington DC to riot in the Florida offices where votes 
were being recounted. The theater of protest became its own story, 
and helped forge public pressure to shut down the Gore campaign's 
attempt to determine the real Florida count. This led to the tragic 
sight of members of the Congressional Black Caucus, one after 
another, unsuccessfully pleading for a single senator to challenge 
the Florida vote because of African American disenfranchisement in 
that state. 
Many Democrats and progressives believe now is the time for 
national advocacy groups to organize an effort similar to the one our 
nation has been promulgating in the former Soviet states and the 
Republicans used in Florida in 2000. One blueprint is laid out in Ian 
Traynor's article in The Guardian at  
http://www.guardian.co.uk/ukraine/story/0,15569,1360236,00.html, 
and the template is both simple, straightforward, and already 
demonstrated to work. 
In what may be a preemptory move, Republicans are now calling for 
an end to exit polls in the USA because, as RNC Chairman and 
former Enron lobbyist Ed Gillespie noted on November 4th, "In 2000 
the exit data was wrong on Election Day, in 2002 the exit returns 
were wrong on Election Day, and in 2004, the exit data were wrong 
on Election Day - all three times, by the way, in a way that skewed 
against Republicans and had a dispiriting effect on Republican 
voters across the country." 
Each of those three "skewed" elections was an opportunity for 
national mobilization by Democrats and progressives. Gillespie 
apparently wants to make sure such an opportunity doesn't again 
present itself. 
Without a progressive national grass-roots response to future 
questionable elections, we'll continue to move toward a single-party 
state, single-voice media, and widespread cynicism about politics 
that causes more Americans to disengage from politics. 
On the other hand, if such a movement loses sight of democracy as 
its central focus and devolves into a partisan or single-candidate 
advocacy group, or is contaminated by external forces with agenda 
other than democracy (as is alleged by some in Ukraine), it risks 
producing a backlash that could be destructive and self-defeating. 
To avoid this, it must focus exclusively on honestly sharing the 
outcome of elections, regardless of what they may be, and working 
for increased transparency in our electoral system (such as getting 
corporate money out of politics, requiring open-source voting 
machine software and paper ballots, promoting Instant Runoff 
Voting, and reinstating FCC rules that will ensure broader public 
debate on the nation's airwaves). 
As generations of activists have taught us, it doesn't work to wait for 
politicians to fix a corrupted political system. It's going to take 
involved and active citizens - operating with transparency and 
ethics, independent of political parties - to cut through the 
accumulated political and media fog. 
And now is the time to begin. Thom Hartmann (thom at 
thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-
selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive 
talk show. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are "The 
Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of 
Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The 
People: A Call To Take Back America," and "What Would Jefferson 
Do?: A Return To Democracy." 

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